AI writer for Outlook

Microsoft's Copilot is excellent inside Outlook, but it needs a licence your employer may not have bought, and it isn't available on every plan. A browser sidebar gives you AI drafting in Outlook web on any plan, with no admin approval needed.

Check your workplace policy first. If you're using a work Outlook account, confirm your organisation permits third-party browser extensions with email access before installing anything. Some do, some don't. This matters more with work email than anywhere else.

What this works with

Outlook on the web (outlook.office.com, outlook.live.com) — full support
Outlook desktop app — not supported, browser extensions can't reach it
Outlook mobile — not supported

If you're on the desktop app, the workaround is opening the same mailbox in a browser tab when you have a long reply to draft.

Setup — under a minute

Install WriterPi from the Chrome Web Store.
Pin the icon (puzzle piece in the toolbar → pin).
Open Outlook web and open any email.
Click the WriterPi icon. Turn on the page toggle so it can read the thread.

Prompts for common Outlook situations

Meeting requests

Reply accepting the meeting. Confirm the time in my timezone. Ask them to send the agenda beforehand. Under 3 sentences.

Decline this meeting politely. Suggest handling it over email instead. Don't sound dismissive.

Status and updates

Draft a status update reply: the work is on track, one item slipped by two days, and I need a decision on [X] by Friday. Professional tone, keep it scannable.

Difficult messages

Reply pushing back on this deadline. Explain it isn't realistic without cutting scope. Offer two alternatives. Firm but collaborative, not defensive.

Draft a reply telling them we found an error in last week's figures. Take responsibility, state what's being fixed, give a date. Four sentences, no over-apologising.

Vendor and external email

Politely decline this vendor pitch. Leave the door open for next financial year. Two sentences.

Tone guide for corporate email

Professional — external partners, senior stakeholders, anything that might get forwarded.
Concise — busy executives. Three sentences or fewer.
Detailed — technical specs, handovers, anything where ambiguity costs money.
Friendly — colleagues you work with regularly.

Corporate email skews formal, so Professional and Concise will cover most of your day. Save Casual for internal chat tools.

Getting the draft into Outlook

Click Copy under the AI reply, click into Outlook's reply box, then Ctrl+V. Copy-paste is more reliable than automatic insertion in Outlook's editor, which is stricter than Gmail's about programmatic input.

Three rules for AI in work email

Never let AI invent facts. Dates, figures, commitments, names — you type those. AI handles structure and phrasing only.
Never AI-draft sensitive messages. Performance conversations, redundancies, complaints, anything involving someone's job or feelings. Write those yourself.
Always read before sending. A confident, well-phrased email containing a wrong figure is worse than a clumsy correct one.

Privacy — what actually happens to your email

WriterPi reads only the single thread you have open, and only when you turn the page toggle on. Content passes through the backend to get a response and is then discarded — nothing is stored on the server and nothing is used for training. Full detail on the privacy page.

That said: with a work account, your IT policy is the deciding factor, not our policy. Ask first.

Speed up your Outlook inbox: Install WriterPi — free, ten replies before signup.